CEMETERY COP: Chapter Three
For a year now folks on Facebook have been asking me to write a book about my work in a number of cemeteries. The process has begun. Here for your reading pleasure is the fictionalized true tales from a Cemetery Cop. CHAPTER THREE Following the early morning opening of the gates and buildings at Beacon Hill Cemetery and an initial inspection of the grounds once the sun came up, it was time to check in. We had to call our dispatcher at the security office every hour. The time itself didn’t matter as long as you were consistent and called on that hour thereafter. Occasionally they’d spot check you – especially if the dispatcher changed shifts and a new guy came on. He or she would need to confirm who was still in the field at the various sites – condos, shopping malls, rail yards, and the cemetery. I rarely missed my calls. Because if they checked on you twice and you didn’t answer there would be a supervisor on site to find out if you had your radio off, you were sleeping…or, worse, dead. And that latter happened at least once that I know of. An officer missed two spot checks on the radio and when the mobile crew went to see what was going on they found him dead beside his patrol car. Heart attack. The next point of business was to inform the cemetery staff that security was on-site. Head office was near the Beacon Hill front gates and it was home base for the administrators who dealt with staff issues and dealing with funeral arrangements – either through third party funeral homes or in-house where full-service funerals/interments could be facilitated. Those services included catering, church services and mourners all in the Visitation Centre. The receptionist, Emily, knew all. She was the link between the admin staff and what was going on in the field each day. I would grab a fresh visitor map from her desk and she’d rhyme off the itinerary for that day. She’d give me the event time and name of the deceased and what section of the cemetery they were being interred or buried. From there it allowed me to plot out traffic needs. Was it strictly graveside? Would there be a contingent of mourners at the Visitation Centre? Was it a big service? A small private service? I’d spend a good 20 minutes plotting it out and making notes. From there I’d move down to the Visitation Centre itself to confirm what they were doing that day in the building and the timing of access and egress and to co-ordinate with their funeral assistants on traffic control. Lots of traffic control. There was only two access points to the Visitation Centre parking lot so it was important people could park confidently and that they could actually find the VC in the first place. It often meant sniping a spot near the front gate and directing cars to where they needed to go. Though the cemetery was clearly marked with signage and colour-specific painted lines to guide you to various buildings, sometimes it was just easier to hand them a map with little arrows drawn on it to guide them. 1 out of every 10 visitors still got lost and would end up right back where I was standing. Between services I was still expected to patrol the rest of the cemetery. Eyes on the ground looking for the hopeless, the helpless or the reckless. At times I was thankful that the cemetery was as big as it was. It allowed for slow drives from section to section. It gave me pause to get out of the car and walk. I was determined not put all the weight back on that I’d lost doing my rail yard job during the previous two years. It would turn out to be a losing battle because in a 15-hour day the most you could really walk around was a few hours in total. You couldn’t be too far away from your vehicle in case you were needed on the other side of the cemetery. In those times when the weather was good I could walk through each section of the graveyard – studying history, making note of surnames and trying to piece together in my minds eye the life story of these lost souls. It was sobering. Looking at the mortality rates of generations gone by. So many died young. Many plots contained five or even six generations of one family. Or there’d be adjoining graves of relatives. There were also the rich, the famous and the notorious. Politicians, sports figures, military figures going as far back as the Rebellion, musicians, artists, TV and movie personalities, inventors, doctors, lawyers, captains of industry and the victims of great disasters like ship sinkings, airplane crashes, and murders. Death made no distinction. Everyone was under the same tree covered canopy. This wasn’t just a self-indulgent exercise, either because I would also make note of broken or defaced gravestones, graffiti and even suspicious items placed on graves. Other times required that I do perimeter checks of the buildings themselves specifically the five mausoleums on site. They varied from the very old and Gothic to the most recent that was under construction the entire time I worked there. Despite the cemetery being ecumenical, three of the mausoleums were geared specifically to Christians – almost exclusively to Italian, Portuguese and Greeks. The ethnic and religious communities in our city paid to have them built and maintained on their behalf. They were ornate and ostentatious. The bodies would be placed in crypts in the walls and family members would decorate the marble face plate with photos and religious iconography and letters and cards written to the deceased from family members. The heartbreak was that these heartfelt pieces of correspondence were almost always from children or grandchildren. The mausoleum was a living document of the grieving. The mausoleums were also emblazoned in marble, gold leaf and life-sized creepy-as-shit statues of various figures from the Bible. If you didn’t focus during foot patrols occasionally you’d turn a corner and Jesus himself would scare the Jesus out of you. Tucked away in the corners of each mausoleum was the newest idea that the funeral industry was incorporating – urn cabinets and display windows for the cremated. It’s one thing to walk down hallways of plaques with names on them – bodes safely encased in the very walls of the buildings but I always found it unsettling to look directly at rows of people’s ashes like you so many curio cabinets. Oh, look, here’s Uncle Gustav’s ashes in a wooden cigar box surrounded by his favourite things – scratch lottery tickets, a photo of his pre-deceased wife, and a dog whistle. Was the dog in there with him too? I felt like a voyeur. You couldn’t help it. Like the gravestones outside, every cubic foot window contained a story. Glorious or tragic. The most poignant I ever saw was that of a Czech freedom fighter from the Second World War whose modestly decorated urn was accompanied by his war medals, his citizenship card to Canada and photos of him with his grandchildren. He died at 92. It was a great life by the looks of it. The single gothic mausoleum, however, is a horror film personified. It had been built over 100 years ago. It was an elegant and classical design with tapestry carpets, vaulted ceilings and marble walls and pillars imported from Europe that came over on ships that may or may not have made it safely across the Atlantic. It contains a chapel upstairs as the centrepiece of the building with crystal chandeliers that sparkle from the sun pouring in through vaulted transom windows overhead. The magnates of industry and wealth are interred here. It features 1,000 families who preferred their crypt to be indoors and not out on the grounds in the insufferable weather. Every marble panel is hand engraved with the names and important dates of each person inside the walls. And in the summer those walls sweat like a steam bath. The ongoing decay, even 100 years later was evident just entering the building. The smell would linger on your clothes. Roses and lavender are said to cover the smell. They do not. Those rich enough to have tombs built inside the mausoleum occupy the back walls of the building. Up to a dozen bodies with a stained glass window as a gift of natural light and a bronze gated door to keep the riff raff out; that included us security guards because only the cemetery staff had keys to the gates. Some of the tombs even contain the furniture and other possessions of the deceased. One such tomb looked like a studio apartment for a student who would never return. Downstairs was newer as the cemetery had dug out the basement for a section of more modern interments that could be accessed through glass doors and stairways leading out to the front of the building. There are also back hallways with narrow maintenance stairwells that lead to the back parking lot for the mausoleum staff and people accessing the maintenance building next door. The smell of death was even stronger here. So much so that the cemetery kept industrial strength dehumidifiers running 24 hours a day to keep the sweat off the walls and lingering scent to a minimum. You never get used to it. This was done for practical reasons as well: pests. Dead bodies decompose and attract a variety of insects not the least of which is death beetles which are about the size of a poppy seed. And they’re creepy as hell when they congregate, en masse, on the nameplate of a crypt or between the spaces in the walls. The cemetery had a team of pest control guys in every week managing the ongoing invasion. It would never be eliminated, but it needed to be managed if for no other reason than not having a loved one come in and see swarms of these things crawling all over a crypt. It was also unsettling to see it when the lights were off and I was patrolling with nothing but a flashlight after hours. Flowers, both real and artificial, decorated every corner of the mausoleums. The real ones would nearly masque the other odours, but I always found that the sickly sweet smell of roses was synonymous with death – mainly because funeral ceremonies were generally filled with truck loads of them in baskets and wreaths. But the most common accoutrements in the mausoleums were tall, eight-inch praying candles. They generally came in two colours – opaque candy-apple red with a tapered opening or a white glazed surface featuring a religious picture emblazoned on the side with a fluted opening. People would use long tinder sticks to set off the wicks, pray to their deity and their loved one and then leave the candles behind – still lit –when they left. It was a fire hazard. Signs on every building warn people not to light candles inside the buildings. Few people obeyed the rule. On more than one occasion small smouldering fires had begun from candles left unattended. The mausoleums were generally drafty and with windows left open to vent the noxious gases – especially in the heat of summer temperatures – candles would easily tip over. The mausoleum carpets were supposed to be fire retardant but we never wanted to test the theory. Frequent patrols inside the buildings were conducted for no other reason than to ensure all the candles had been extinguished. Following several visits from family members the candles would have no wax left to burn and they’d be tossed in the garbage cans around the cemetery and replaced immediately with an identical new candle. The ritual would continue ad infinitum. Similarly, any real flowers put in the mausoleums. Their life expectancy was quite short and it was a constant struggle for staff to keep on top of removing them before they became unsightly. It wasn’t unusual to see a stack of baskets and wreaths three or four feet high outside the front doors of the mausoleums waiting to be picked up by maintenance staff for disposal. Such was the cycle of death.
